


Pro-Aggression Pact

by lepidopteran



Series: Mutually Assured Destruction [1]
Category: The Young Ones (TV 1982)
Genre: Canon-Typical Swears, Canon-Typical Violence, Consensual Violence, Drug Use, M/M, canon-typical disregard for basic hygiene, critical theory namedropping, rated T but don't read it to your grandma, rick's bottom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-29
Updated: 2017-08-29
Packaged: 2018-12-21 11:32:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11943285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lepidopteran/pseuds/lepidopteran
Summary: “I don’t think it’s possible for a brain to shrivel up, Vyvyan,” Rick sneers. He fishes the toothbrush out of the toilet, swipes it across Vyv’s studded chest, and tosses it into the sink.“Who here is almost practically a doctor?” Vyvyan says. He hocks spit into his palm and thrusts it towards Rick’s chest. “Yes or no. We keep on thrashing each other -- that is, mostly I thrash you, while you shriek like a girl. Or else we try to get along without each other.”





	Pro-Aggression Pact

**Author's Note:**

> Set at some indeterminate point pre-series

Time spent with Vyvyan thrills Rick for the very reason it terrifies him later: the senseless violence, the high he gets from feeling entirely unhinged, deliciously naughty and _anarchic_. The next morning he’ll half piss himself when he imagines what would happen if the _pigs_ showed up.

Wonders whether he perhaps should’ve _called_ the pigs on Vyvyan to dodge impending accomplice charges, when the security footage at their local Barclays shows him hopping on one foot shouting “Redistribute it! Redistribute all of it!” while Vyv puts his head through the front window. Remembers how quickly he’ll be booted from the sociology department if the Dean of Students catches the slightest whiff of vice and/or iniquity. Then he’ll _never_ get a byline in _Dissent_ magazine. Or even that authoritarian rag, the _New Left Review._ It’s all a bit heavy.

Yet every morning he knows, without a shadow of a doubt, he’ll do it again next weekend. Sooner, if he can. The moment he glimpses Vyvyan across a crowded street, leaning against a signpost with a fag dangling from his mouth, one boot untied, sledgehammer slung casually over his shoulder, flicking his wild eyes from Rick to the Dean of Students’ car -- Rick knows he’ll walk right off campus and follow Vyvyan to the ends of London.

So when Vyvyan hatches a plan to insinuate themselves into a real adult off-campus lifestyle, Rick can think of nothing to say but yes. The very thought of spending morning, noon, and night in the electrifying presence of an infuriating madman -- it thrills and it terrifies.

But rosy dreams of unending adventure are dashed when it comes to light that in such close quarters, the opportunities are irresistible: to ransack and raze eachothers’ belongings, persons, and the very roof over their heads.

It’s an unknown night in the second week (maybe a Friday or Saturday, but they don’t abide by calendars) when Rick finds Vyvyan leaning against the doorframe to the loo, blocking his path. They’re at the tail end of their first really spectacular row, which coincides with a less spectacular first house party, and Rick has had almost an entire mug of cider.

“Shove off, Vyvyan, I’ve got to piss,” Rick says. He stumbles, and braces one hand on an immovable denim-shelled shoulder for support.

Vyvyan shifts to the side, letting him stagger past, but resumes leaning before Rick can slam the door in his face.

“What are you doing?” Rick says. “Fancy a look at my bottom?”

“I don’t give a rat’s arse about a rat’s arse,” Vyvyan says.  
  
It takes Rick a moment to catch his meaning. He’s almost forgot the initial catalyst for their row. Rick informed Neil that it was Vyvyan, not himself, who pilfered from his stash; that he himself did not dull his sharp wit and poetic genius with drugs. Apparently, such honesty makes him a rat, a snitch, and several other nasty pejoratives that all add up to the unacceptable insinuation that he’s some kind of fascist.  
  
In spite of his pride, Rick does manage a small, shameful pang of contrition. He knows full well that Vyvyan needs pot far more than that space-case hippie. It was a surprise, at first, to find out Vyvyan partakes -- his image isn’t exactly suggestive of a stoner. But he gets so keyed up and pot, short of a pickaxe to the head, is the only reliable way to knock himself out. He stays up for three days, smokes a heroic portion of weed, sleeps, and repeats. Meanwhile Neil, so effortlessly chilled out, haughtily scorns sleep.

“Well don’t look, then,” Rick says, fumbling with his fly.

Vyvyan, to his surprise, turns his back. But he stays in the doorframe. Over the sound of a waterfall of piss, he says, “Sorry.” The word is pushed out through his teeth, jaw clenched, as if it demands tremendous effort.

Rick shoves his surprise down and musters up fresh vitriol to say, “You bloody well should be, you fascist bully. I am _not_ a rat or -- or any of those other things you said.” A two-faced backstabber. He looks down at his pathetically dripping willy, from which he shakes a few final drops of piss. He imagines them to be the tears of betrayal his stoic eyes withhold. That’s rather good: he ought to use it in a poem.

He glances over at Vyvyan. His arms are tightly crossed, but he’s neither stomped off nor had another go at his favorite pastime of finding out which of Rick’s body parts he can stick through which hard surfaces. So Rick takes a deep breath in and says, “I’m not trying to ruin your life. Not all the way, anyhow.”

At the metallic sound of Rick zipping up, Vyvyan turns his head just a little to look over his shoulder, and says. “Look at Rick, talking about his _feelings_. You big girl.” But before Rick can swat at his stupid hair with the grubby toilet brush, he adds, “What I mean to say is --” he stamps his boots as if he’s cold, and sticks his hands in his pockets, looking away again. “Well, it’s like this, see.”

“Spit it out, mouthbreather,” Rick says.

Vyvyan spins ‘round on his heels to face Rick, stares him dead in the eyes, and reaches to grip white-knuckled on the door frame for a quick pull-up that seems calculated to show off his pale, fuzzy belly. Unwilling to reward him with attention, Rick sniffs and turns to the mirror to attend to a scabby spot on his chin. But he surreptitiously slides his gaze just enough to the right to catch, distorted in the broken mirror, the wobble of flesh over muscle. He clenches his teeth and focuses his eyes firmly back on his chin, scratching furiously at the spot.

“I don’t want to hurt you.” A few plaster flakes land on Vyvyan’s shoulders when he drops down. “Not if you don’t want me to, anyway.” There’s a hint of a leer in his voice, Rick thinks, but he just doesn’t have the energy to pick on it.

Rick shrugs, rinses something crusty and blue-ish off the household toothbrush, and scrubs vehemently at the end of one pigtail. “If you want to kill me, Vyvyan, go ahead and do it. Or just throw me out of my home like a fascist landlord. Neil and Mike would throw a _parade_ , I’m sure.”

“That’s not what I want, ya naff,” Vyv says. He tugs on the sleeve of Rick’s blazer and pulls him around to face him. At high velocity, the toothbrush flies out of Rick’s hand and into the toilet bowl, splattering piss on his trousers.

“You _bastard_ ,” Rick says. “I’ll have to rinse it _again_.”

“Look, I only want to say I _know_ I’m a bastard,” Vyvyan says. “And I won’t apologize for it. But I want you to hate me in the _Rick and Vyvyan_ way, right. Not the _Soppy Git Runs Off to Die Alone Buried in Fashion Mags Without Anyone to Make a Man Out of Him_ sort of way _._ ”

“Well, I suppose the first one will have to do,” Rick says. “Because I’m _not_ a soppy git, and I _don’t_ read fashion magazines at all. I don’t know where you got that idea.”

Vyv grins. “Under your bed, that’s where. Pansy.” He lets go of Rick’s sleeve, but stabs a bloody-knuckled forefinger in the general direction of his face. “I’m pretty sure I’ve cracked it. I’m pretty sure we’ve gotta keep _trying_ to kill each other, or we’ll really kill each other. Constant senseless violence leaves us no time to premeditate a murder. We need an outlet, that’s what.”

“I see,” Rick says. “Well now, Vyv, you _might_ be onto something. But it all sounds rather too Freudian.” Rick has never read Freud. It’s surely a waste of time. The oeuvre of Deleuze and Guattari has convinced him that psychoanalysis is poisonous modernist reactionism. But come to that, he supposes Deleuze and Guattari must have read quite a lot of Freud themselves, only to put the fascist in his place.

“Don’t overthink it,” Vyvyan says. “Your brain will shrivel up if you don’t give up all your bloody thinking.”

“I don’t think it’s _possible_ for a brain to shrivel up, _Vyvyan_ ,” Rick sneers. He fishes the toothbrush out of the toilet, swipes it across Vyv’s studded chest, and tosses it into the sink.

“Who here is almost practically a doctor?” Vyvyan says. He hocks spit into his palm and thrusts it towards Rick’s chest. “Yes or no. We keep on thrashing each other -- that is, mostly I thrash you, while you shriek like a girl. Or else we try to get along without each other.”

Rick knows Vyv is right, and he knows what he’ll say, what it’s hard to imagine not saying to Vyvyan. “Yes, alright,” he snaps, and throws his own hand forward to grasp at Vyvyan’s. Rick’s grip is limp and Vyvyan’s is vice-like so it’s more like being shaken than shaking on it. But a pact is a pact.

Then Rick says, “Oh, wait, listen to this, Vyv. Listen. Remember before, when you said you’re a bastard? Well, you _are_ a _Basterd_ ,” he crows, doing his best to emphasize the E. “It’s even on your _birth certificate_.”

Vyvyan fails to laugh uproariously, probably because the sophisticated humour goes over his head. “Piss off,” he says and, squeezing Rick’s hand so the spittle squelches between their palms, tugs him toward the stairs. “Let’s watch your stupid game show.”

Later, they’re sprawled half-unconscious on the couch. On the TV, a lobotomized Dusty Bin vomits animated confetti from his skull cavity to the sound of brassy jazz. Vyv’s head somehow finds its way to Rick’s lap. Rick doesn’t mind. It gives him an opportunity to pick apart the tricorn  helmet of nuclear orange hair and find out which of Rick’s smaller belongings are glued into it this time.  
  
He’s already found a sticky toffy and a scrap of cereal box on which he penned a particularly rousing poem:

 _Breakfast!_  
_The rich eat their breakfast_  
_Til nothing is left for us:_  
_Breakfast!_  
_Watch out, selfish fascist,_  
_When the kids have a wreck-fest_  
_We’ll redistribute your  
_ _Breakfast!_

Vyvyan is puffing on a clumsy joint constructed from Neil’s pot and a scrap of a _Cosmo_ back-issue. Rick’s read that one eight times, and he already clipped out the spread with Duran Duran, so he doesn’t mind. The particularly acrid combination, wheezed out directly in his face, has left him woozy on second-hand pot smoke and chemical dye fumes. All this combined with several more sips of cider, and he’s feeling a bit silly.

“Vyv,” Rick says, tugging harder at his hair. A particularly bleach-fried clump comes out by the roots, and Rick shakes it off his hand and onto the rug. “Hey, Vyv.” His eyes are closed tight, but he’s still inhaling heavily on the joint clutched in his yellow teeth, expelling jet streams through his nose.

“Wassat,” Vyvyan says, the joint somehow staying upright. Light from the smouldering tip glints off his metallic forehead.

“What’re you even going to do,” Rick says. “When you get your degree.”

Vyvyan cracks one eye open at that, and plucks the joint out of his mouth, only to wave it in a broad and meaningless gesture. “Ah-ha! You assume I’ll graduate.”

“You study all the time,” Rick says. “You even go to lectures. You bring home rotty legs and whole skeletons and things.” He plucks at a bit of chapped skin on his lip. “You even sound like you know what you’re talking about, sometimes.”

Vyvyan frowns. “You really wanna know?” he says, looking up at Rick. His eyes are tiny and round and red-rimmed. “Not taking the piss? ‘Cause I’ll take your scrawny arse outside.”

“Have a _little_ faith, Vyvyan,” Rick snaps. “And leave my bottom out of this.”

Vyvyan takes a final drag and stubs out the joint on the carpet. “I want to do reverse psychiatry.”

“What on _earth_ is that,” says Rick. “D’you mean reverse _psychology_ , you nincompoop?”

“You heard me, piss-ant,” Vyvyan says. “Reverse psychiatry. Made it up myself. I wanna develop drugs that make nutters like us _more_ crazy. So we can act even more bonkers without giving a crap. Hell, I’ll even fix up normal people, like Mike and Neil.”  
  
He pauses to tug on his septum ring, which by Rick’s personal speculation means he’s feeling vulnerable. But it probably just means the piercing’s gone putrefactive again. “It’s my calling, Rick,” he says. “My debt to the world. It’s the greatest good for the greatest number of people.”

“Oh well,” says Rick. It _does_ sound delightfully Deleuzian. Guattarian? Both. “I thought maybe you could fix me up, if you ever, oh I don’t know -- break my back wrapping me around a roof beam, and I need my spine fused.”

“I’ll still do that,” Vyvyan rasps, and nuzzles his sweaty nose under the hem of Rick’s blazer.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a transparent attempt to make all the violence somewhat consensual lmao help me
> 
> The Dusty Bin thing refers to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1aW0H-Guy0


End file.
